As mobile devices have become more capable and mobile digital television standards have developed, it has become increasingly practical to view video programming on such devices. The small screens of these devices, however, present some limitations, particularly for the viewing of sporting events. Small objects, such as the ball in a sports program, can be difficult to see. The use of high video compression ratios can exacerbate the situation by significantly degrading the appearance of small objects like a ball, particularly in a far-view scene.
It can therefore be desirable to apply image processing to enhance the appearance of the ball. However, detecting the ball in sports videos or videos with other small moving objects is a challenging problem. For instance, the ball can be occluded or merged with field lines. Even when it is completely visible, its properties, such as shape, area, and color, may vary from frame to frame. Furthermore, if there are many objects with ball-like properties in a frame, it is difficult to make a decision as to which is the ball based upon only one frame, and thus difficult to perform image enhancement.
Previous methods of detecting and tracking moving objects such as soccer balls and the like have been developed which are fairly robust and accurate. Such a method is disclosed in PCT/US10/002039.
However, previous methods can fail in some situations. Examples of failure include not tracking the desired object such as a ball or tracking another object that is not the desired object.
As such, a need exist to provide an improved method of detecting and tracking moving objects which overcome the deficiencies of the prior art.